Amanda Knox, 32, sat down with NBC News anchor Lester Holt on Oct. 3 to discuss her fears about going back to Italy this past June for the the Criminal Justice Festival in Modena. “We spoke on the phone shortly before you made that trip,” Lester began. “And you sounded like you were genuinely afraid.” “I was genuinely afraid,” Amanda confessed. “The fact that I had been invited by the Italy Innocence Project and welcomed to take part in their event was tremendously important to me,” Amanda continued. “But that didn’t change the fact that I still have people who send me messages describing how they’re going to murder me.”
But Amanda became considerably emotional talking about how difficult it is to build relationship, even years after her acquittal. “Do you care what people think anymore?” Lester bluntly asked her. Through tears swelling in her eyes, Amanda provided some insight to her experience. “I wonder if people would care about my experience beyond whether they think I’m guilty or innocent,” she revealed. “I worry that when I meet people they will have a great conversation with me face to face, and then they’ll walk away and go, ‘Yea I talked to the killer Amanda Knox.'”
Despite the onslaught of threats and continued scrutiny she receives, Amanda made the journey back to Italy for the first time since 2011. The last time Amanda was there, she was behind bars and charged for the murder of her roommate, British student Meredith Kercher. Amanda was convicted of Meredith’s brutal murder in 2007 and pleaded not guilty in 2009 to the charges of murder, sexual assault, simulating a burglary and theft. Amanda served four years in prison out of what would have been a 26-year sentence. She was acquitted in March 2015, but that hasn’t stopped many from hurling threats her way. Upon her return to Italy, Amanda was swarmed by the media, but subsequently took aim at the very people who chased her down at the airport for the way they covered the infamous case in the media. The press turned Amanda into a “she-devil” and dubbed her “Foxy Knoxy.”
Amanda called out the terms and various other innuendos in her address when speaking at the conference. “They painted me as a dirty psychopathic man eater,” Amanda said, speaking in Italian. “Guilty, until proven otherwise.” Amanda has maintained her innocence and continues to do work on behalf of those who are wrongfully convicted. As she described in a September 2016 Good Morning America interview, “I think it is our moral duty to examine the cases of a wrongfully convicted person from the perspective of their humanity. And to really demand that we have objective looks at their cases and the facts of their case, as well as them as people, as opposed to demonizing them as I was.”